If you're a Palm fan, you might want to look away - or not. Chris Ziegler has written a fantastic article on the short rise and eventual demise of webOS, and with it, Palm. I'm generally not a fan of companies, but I have my exceptions - and Palm is one of them. Correction - Palm was one of them.

I read article and I am confused: what was wrong with new OS for Palm (Prima)?

"Mercer's stuff was garbage," one source bluntly told us. "All he had was a nice demo, but nothing really worked," said another. "The software team was getting close to mutiny. It was untenable to build what we wanted to build." Simple tasks like centering text on the screen required five lines of code. ...

It wasn't looking good. Just months into Elevation Partners' investment, morale in Palm's engineering corps was already flagging. Executives had sold them on a change-the-world mentality and Duarte had delivered the blueprint for a revolutionary user interface, but Mercer's operating system had few believers beyond the small group of engineers (around four, we're told) that he directly controlled.

ok, so what exactly Prima was?

I see that Prima was major problem in Palm but I can not figure out what part of OS Prima was... ?? or it was complete OS?